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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25262812">If, Almost and Maybe</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/petrodactyl352/pseuds/petrodactyl352'>petrodactyl352</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Allusion to Rape, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Episode: s03ep10 Abandon All Hope, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief/Mourning, Hints Of a Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Internal Monologue, Multi, OT3 if you squint, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Season/Series 03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:00:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,314</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25262812</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/petrodactyl352/pseuds/petrodactyl352</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Lying on the bloodstained sheets with the smell of Taka and Sumi’s death still lingering in the air and the brands of their betrayal still burning fresh on his body, Alucard is left to see exactly where it is this path will lead him—towards the compassion and forgiveness of his mother or the hatred and bitterness of his father—all while the future lies ahead, uncertain.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Sumi/Taka, Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>91</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>If, Almost and Maybe</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>just a little internal monologue of what alucard might be thinking right after he kills taka and sumi in episode 10. allusions to trephacard because im a hopeless shipper. </p><p>please comment if you liked it, or if you'd like me to continue this. im also open to constructive criticism.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He doesn’t want to move.</p><p>It doesn’t matter—or he doesn’t care—that the blood is still drying on his skin, sticky and viscous, that there are two corpses at his feet, their lifeblood soaking steadily through the mattress and lending a heavy iron stench to the air. It doesn’t matter that the wires that had expanded from the cuffs they had bound him with still twine around him loosely, chafing painfully against the lacerations they’d burned into his skin. Silver, and blessed silver at that. A full-blooded vampire would have gone mad with the pain of it immobilizing them, but Alucard’s human half ensures that it’s excruciating but bearable. </p><p>But he welcomes the pain of it. Almost relishes in it. </p><p>He’s still on his back in the middle of the bed, a bloody cross among the white blankets and the silken sheets. He can’t bear to look at the carnage at his feet, at what he had been forced to do. Instead he stares blankly at the wall to his right, transfixed by the stray splatter of blood that’s somehow found its way onto the wallpaper, a small arcing smear of red. His head is filled with a blank sort of buzzing, the chill of the room cooling the sweat on his naked body and filling his limbs with ice. </p><p>Even his mind feels cold, frozen solid and refusing to think. So, instead of thinking it replays in horrible, perfect detail everything that had happened, every warning sign he should have seen, every red flag, every time he should have sat up and told them no. But all he had been able to do was lie there, stunned and disbelieving and so <em>alone</em> that their touch had chased away all and any semblance of reason in his mind. </p><p>He had allowed this to happen.</p><p>He had seen their glances at each other whenever one of them brought up the mechanism that had moved the castle, how frequently they did so. It had been so obvious. How could he not have seen it? Or perhaps he had seen it, and had thought nothing of it, having underestimated the impact of their incarceration and the torture their own minds had endured since they were children. How it had corroded the word <em>trust</em> for them, turned it into something alien and disfigured, something elusive and something that hung tantalizingly just out of reach. And so when he had given it to them, they threw it away, sure that it had been another illusion, another falsehood, another <em>lie</em>.</p><p>But he had not lied to them.</p><p>
  <em>I never lied to you.</em>
</p><p>Hadn’t he?</p><p>
  <em>I am not against you.</em>
</p><p>Wasn’t he? </p><p>
  <em>I gave you everything.</em>
</p><p>Didn’t he?</p><p>Doubt after doubt sows itself into his brain, digging deep into his mind and making what little he could process about everything that had happened fracture. And finally, as they take root and begin to extend their feelers into his conscious he feels it, bubbling up in his chest and closing off his throat, cutting off his breath.</p><p>He doesn’t quite know if it’s hopelessness or grief. If it’s panic or fear. All he knows is that if he stays here with their blood drying on his skin and the phantom touches of their hands and lips on his body and their corpses at his feet for one more second he may well go mad. </p><p>He lurches into action so abruptly that his head spins, his vision blurring alarmingly. He scrambles off the bed, fingers clawing desperately at the metal wires still clinging to his chest and arms and legs. There’s a brief moment when they won’t come off, still encircling his limbs loosely, and the panic-grief-fear-hopelessness in his mind whites out his vision and he tears at them desperately, almost savagely, a strangled cry scraping past his throat. </p><p>Once he’s free of them and they fall in unspooling loops of silver on the floor he blindly snatches the bloody white sheets to his chest, the smooth stained fabric covering the sight of his own hideously scarred skin from him as he stumbles blindly out of the room and down the corridor, no other destination in his mind but <em>away.</em></p><p>He doesn’t even realize where he is until he’s already there. </p><p>A charred carpet, a silver ring. A bed too small and one post torn away. Constellations painted on the ceiling and a broken window. He hasn’t stepped into this room since the night he had killed his father. The ghosts are strongest here, threatening to fill him with memories and nightmares and those horrible words <em>almost</em> and <em>maybe</em> and until he chokes on the weight of his own grief and his loss. </p><p>So why is he here now?</p><p>He feels a dull sort of pain emanating from his knees and realizes belatedly that he’s fallen to them before the carpet, his hands shaking, the ring glinting in the moonlight, a world of possibilities in that one small circle of metal. A world of <em>if</em>s. <em>If</em> his mother hadn’t died. <em>If</em> his father had grieved and allowed himself to grieve, if he had not turned to blind rage. <em>If</em> Alucard didn’t have to kill his own father, wipe out what little family he had left. <em>If</em> Trevor and Sypha had not left him here alone. <em>If</em> he had not been so naïve and lonely and self-pitying and had not allowed Taka and Sumi to violate his trust, his body, his belief that people were worth saving. <em>If</em> he hadn’t killed them. <em>If, if, if.</em> He hates the word, more than anything else. It is the line that he has been shoved across ever since his mother had died. To him it represents everything that has been torn from him, a normal life. A happy one. One that does not end in him lying on his knees in the room he had been a child in and then had been an adult in, killing his own father, now the room where he has come to for whatever godforsaken reason to grieve about one more loss, one more missing piece, one more <em>if</em>.</p><p>The tears begin before he is fully aware of it, sliding down his cheeks and spattering on the floor like diamonds. Once they start, he knows nothing he can do will stop them, and so he succumbs to it instead of trying to fight it. The tremor in his hands spreads to his whole body, and before he long he’s wracked with shudders, arms wrapped around himself, whether to cover the scars or for warmth or for stability he does not know. The quiet tears turn to sobs and his shoulders shake with every one, a terrible churning void opening up in his chest, something ugly and dark and empty. </p><p>He had not loved them, but he thought that perhaps in time he might have come to. He had cared for them, was fond of them, trusted them. And they had seen him merely as something disposable, something to use and throw away. And once they had assumed he did not have their best interests at heart and that he was not as eager as they were, they had attempted to eliminate him. As if he had meant nothing to them. </p><p>It is that, which hurts the most. An old wound, torn open once more—because hadn’t this happened once before? Hadn’t he helped Trevor and Sypha, fought with them, had come to care for them even, and then they had left him, without a second thought? Without sparing so much as a single question of how he would fare here, in the place he had killed his father after growing up there with his family, brutally torn apart within the span of a year, most of which Alucard had spent asleep. To him, it had been only a week since his mother had died, not a year. And they had left him here. As if he would be all right.</p><p>He curls in on himself further, the pain like a physical thing inside him. It eats away at him, corroding and burning and whittling away at everything that had kept him sane. No longer able to hold himself up he curls up on the floor, the hard wooden surface of it digging into his shoulder. His fingers claw at his back, feeling the raw burned scars on his skin, feeling the laceration open up and bleed afresh. He’s aware, distantly, of the sheets that are splayed and tangled around his waist, that they’re covered in blood, blood he has spilled. But that doesn’t matter now. </p><p>The longer he lies there on the blackened floor of his childhood bedroom, his father’s ashes still scattered on the floor and his wedding ring gleaming on the gaps made by the fire, sobbing into his fingers, the clearer things begin to become. </p><p>It’s steady and deliberate and painful beyond belief, but the tangle of grief and hopelessness in his chest begins to slowly turn to something else, crystallizing inside him into something far, far deadlier. </p><p>Hatred.</p><p>Hatred for his mother, who died and left him. Hatred for his father, who chose war and death instead of grief and being there for his son and allowing his son to be there for him. Hatred for Trevor and Sypha, who left him after he was just beginning to come to love them. Hatred for Taka and Sumi, who had taken his trust and had flung it back into his face, had taken and taken and taken from him and gave him nothing in return but the weight of another <em>if</em>. And perhaps most powerfully of all, hatred for himself. </p><p>He has to be alone. That way he can protect other people, and protect himself from other people. If he allows anyone to come as close as Trevor and Sypha and Taka and Sumi had, then they will destroy him. And he cannot allow that to happen. He can never be <em>not</em> alone ever again. </p><p>And to be alone, people must be warned. They must be kept away. And the best way to tell people what will happen to them if they let themselves close to him is not to tell them at all—but to show them. </p><p>If Taka and Sumi thought he was nothing but a tool to use and then toss away, then he will do the same to them. Let them be an example of what happens to those who cross him. </p><p>Liquid rage fills him, hatred and anger melding in his chest into something powerful and something terrible. He had tried to be like his mother. He had tried to help people. But people did not want his help, it seemed. People wanted to accept his trust and turn away from him, turn <em>on</em> him. People did not deserve his help. Perhaps his father had had the right idea all along after all. Perhaps people <em>are</em> the problem. </p><p>He is burning and cold all at once. </p><p>He is his father’s son—why should he try to act like it’s any different? Alucard and Dracula, two sides to the same coin. Maybe it’s time to honor his father rather than mourn him. </p><p>He gets to his feet, feeling a thousand years old and like a child at the same time. He looks down at the bloodstained sheet at his feet, at the ring glinting on the floor. Uncaring that he’s naked, he turns and leaves the room, leaving bloody footprints behind him as he walks—or perhaps that’s merely his imagination. What’s the difference, now? Reality and unreality, the lines between them have begun to blur. </p><p>He dresses mechanically, fitting his sword to his belt even though he doesn’t need it. He approaches the bed, towards the first body, the one closest to the door. Taka. He looks smaller in death, his skin stretched and pale, his veins empty. His eyes are half-open, only the whites showing through the slit he can see. He makes to lift him up, then hesitates. As much as he wants to give them an undignified death and wants them to be props and nothing more, the thought of seeing their naked bodies every day after what they had done, the guise under which they had seduced him and tried to murder him, is repulsive to him. </p><p>He stoops, lifting their discarded nightclothes from the floor and running a careful eye over them. They’re relatively clean, though he knows when he does what he does they will be stained as well. But it’s of little importance. </p><p>Once their corpses are dressed, albeit somewhat scantily, he lifts them, so detached from it all that he makes no move when their hair hangs lank and stiff with blood down his back, smearing red onto his shirt. He makes sure his skin isn’t in contact with theirs as he deposits their bodies onto the last step of the castle’s entrance, then moves forward near the trees to find branches that will suit the task he has in mind. He snaps off two thick, sturdy ones that will suffice, then unsheathes his blade, guiding it with his will and telling it to sharpen them, to make pikes so like the one he had driven into his father’s heart all those weeks ago. </p><p>He feels no satisfaction as he drives the stakes through their bodies, only ruthlessness. Only cold. Only determination. This does not matter to him. They do not matter to him. He tells himself that, over and over again, not flinching as he feels the wood push through their bodies. He angles them carefully, tearing the insides of their throats open so that the sharp ends of the pikes jut out through their mouths. Open in silent screams, forever. A fitting end to their cowardice and their indifference. </p><p>He drives Sumi’s pike to the right of the steps, letting the free end dig deeply into the earth so that it stands upright. Her body holds its place, not slipping as he steps back, surveying the fruits of his labor. It’ll have to do. She looks even smaller than Taka had earlier in the room, a little girl who’d had her life stolen from her, enslaved and mistreated all her life, had escaped at last to save the people who had been enslaved with her, had traveled so far that she may well have been in a different world. A little girl who had asked him for help, a little girl who had come to his bedroom with a sly smile on her face and a handful of empty promises and heart full of malice and disguised hatred. </p><p>He looks away from her, the beginnings of pity fading from his heart. He cannot pity them now. Especially now. </p><p>He drives the pike onto which he’d forced Taka’s body into the earth at the foot of the left end of the steps so that the pair of them flank the entrance to the castle as if in gruesome, grotesque guard. He stands and gazes at them as the sun rises, its buttery golden light slowly creeping up their bodies, from their limp feet up to their thighs, blood streaking the insides of their skin and where the hems of their flimsy nightgowns blow up in the wind. It slides up their torsos and then up to their faces, Taka’s eyes nearly closed and Sumi’s almost fully open. Crows and sparrows will peck them away soon, he knows, leaving the sockets festering and oozing. </p><p>Later these bodies will be unrecognizable as they rot and decay on the sticks they’ve been forced onto, not having been allowed to turn back into soil as they would if he had buried them. But allowing them to return to the earth that had birthed everything would be a mercy, and he does not intend to treat them with mercy. Later still they will be nothing but bone, skin and muscle and sinew stripped away by time and nature. Doomed to guard this place for eternity.</p><p>He is truly and wholly alone now. </p><p>Well—maybe not wholly. As he turns to walk back into the castle he thinks he sees the shadow of a shimmering figure standing by the doors, one with thick dark hair, segmented brows and playful dark eyes, gazing at him unsmilingly before it vanishes. Two more ghosts, then. He wonders where he will see these phantoms. His father he sees in the study and the corridors; his mother in the library and in the lab she had studied in; Trevor and Sypha in the Belmont Hold and outside on the steps. Where will he see Taka and Sumi? In the forest? His bedroom? The kitchen, where they had spent so much time together, laughing and talking and drinking?</p><p>He moves back towards the doors, casting but one glance back at the foot of the stairs where his new warning signs rustle softly in the slight breeze that the morning blows across the trees. Again, looking at them he feels nothing. No pity, no bitterness. Only anger. Though he does not know it as the days pass by the anger inside him will erode, and then horror and remorse and helpless pity will overcome him, and he will no longer find the heart to blame them, sympathy and understanding replacing ruthless and pitiless hatred and rage. But for now, that lies in the future, and is thus unknowable to him. </p><p>Trevor and Sypha will not return to him. Of that he is sure. Surely they are off somewhere in the country, having fun and enjoying each other’s company, each other’s warmth, the way they had even when he was with them. They would have no reason to return here of all places, where there is nothing for them. Burrowing its way past the frozen block of icy anger in his chest is the barest twinge of disappointment, regret, sadness. Jealousy, maybe. Though even he isn’t sure of whom he is jealous. Him, or her. Her, or him. </p><p>Perhaps they are the reason he allowed Taka and Sumi into his bed without so much as a word of complaint. Perhaps they had reminded him of another young man and woman, impossibly different in countenance and yet similar in their eagerness to learn, quickness to laugh, easiness to tease and complain with smiles in their eyes. Perhaps something buried deep inside him still craved that spark only they had been able to tease out in him. But Taka and Sumi hadn’t been able to. He’d merely thought they had.</p><p>He gives a little shake of his head, as if to physically dislodge the small arrow of nostalgia that had lodged itself into his icy shield. He turns away from the doors once more, allowing them to clang shut behind him, the cold resealing over his heart once more.</p><p>Time will pass, he knows. Spring will bleed into summer, summer will bleed into autumn, autumn will bleed into winter. And he will be here. And he will be alone. Again, he may not know it now, but company is soon to arrive in the shape of a wagon, a familiar wagon, the back of which he had watched recede into the woods so many months ago. Grief will be shared and tears will be shed and a more-than-fair amount of wine will be drunk, and perhaps there may even be a messy but sweet kiss or two, placed on shaking lips. But that he does not, cannot, know now. That comes in a mere week from now, and though he can do many extraordinary things, he cannot foresee the future.</p><p>Alucard walks deeper into the castle, on the same path his father had walked so many years ago, and outside the sun reaches its zenith in the sky.</p>
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